The Bobby Blend combines five computer rankings: Bill Connelly's SP+, Jeff Sagarin's ratings, Kenneth Massey's, the Congrove Computer Rankings and a new one of my own. Three of the five have South Carolina State in the top ten of FCS. The other two, Sagarin and Massey, have the Bulldogs 33rd and 21st.

The Blend puts all five on one scale, standard deviations above an average FCS team, and averages them. The disagreement number is how far, on average, each of the five sits from that Blend: zero means they all agree, and the bigger it gets, the louder the argument. SC State's is 0.49, the widest in the top 25. The median top-25 team has half as much disagreement: 0.24. The Bulldogs get twice the argument of a normal good team, why?

Where each computer ranks them

One rating only counts two of their wins

SC State is 4-0 and has outscored its opponents 204-30. Two of the four were Savannah State and Virginia State, both Division II, beaten 87-0 and 66-0 in Orangeburg. Eighty-seven is a basketball score. Eighty-seven to nothing isn't even that.

Sagarin prints his house rule near the top of his page, in capital letters, that he only rates Division I teams. D2 schools need not apply. So in his file the Bulldogs are a two-game team: 31-13 over Florida A&M in Miami, and 20-17 at Furman last Saturday. Florida A&M is 105th in the Blend and Furman is 39th. Of the 266 teams he rates, only nineteen have played an easier schedule than SC State.

Furman is the best evidence anyone has, and it cuts both ways. It was SC State's first win at Furman since 1982, and it was a three-point game. Keely Watson opened the scoring with a 65-yard throw to DJ Maultsby, the Bulldogs led 14-0, and Furman ran 34 times for 53 yards. Furman also got back within three on a 67-yard touchdown late. A top-ten team wins that game. So does the 30th-best team in the country.

For scale, Montana beat Utah Tech 35-14 at home on Sept. 12. Utah Tech is 107th in the Blend, and every computer marked the Griz down for it. Eighteen points on a neutral field over Florida A&M is the same kind of result.

The three optimists each have a way to see something Sagarin doesn't. SP+ still leans on its preseason projection this early, and the Bulldogs walked into 2026 as defending HBCU national champions. Congrove's number moves with scoring margin, and 87-0 is a lot of margin. My own proprietary rating system counts the Division II games.

I don't believe it. Neither do the humans: the Stats Perform poll has them 16th. You'll see SC State called No. 14 this week. That's the AFCA coaches poll, and nobody believes the coaches poll. I quote it anyway whenever it has the Griz ranked higher too. The case for top ten is two Division II shutouts and a reputation. But SC State has a chance to prove me wrong, sort of. More on that later.

The other top-25 teams the computers can't agree on

And here's my rooting interest, Montana is currently 14th, six thousandths of a standard deviation behind them. I'm trying to scope the field, even if we aren't likely to see them in the playoffs. Montana's argument is with my rating system, which has the Griz 23rd. It also watched the Oregon State game. Yikes.

The five widest disagreements in the Blend top 25. Out of line: the system furthest from the Blend, named when the spread is 0.30 or more.

The games that will settle it, kinda

SC State has eight regular-season games left, all against Division I teams, so Sagarin's file goes from two games to ten by Nov. 21. None of the eight is in the Blend's top 50.

Home games in Orangeburg unless marked. Blend ranks from the Sept. 21 ratings, among 128 FCS teams.

What settles it is margin, which is exactly what the systems are fighting about. Saturday at Bethune-Cookman is the first read. Massey projects 37-21. Sagarin's ratings think it will be much closer, a 5-point margin. Two touchdowns and the optimists bank a point; a one-score game in Daytona Beach and the skeptics do.

The last word is Dec. 12 in Atlanta, where the MEAC champion meets the SWAC champion in the Celebration Bowl. The best SWAC team in the Blend is Jackson State, 26th. Their toughest game is Alabama State, 54th. SC State could cruise to an undefeated regular season without ever playing a team rated higher than Furman, who's unlikely to make the playoff. Sorry, Paladins.

Until then, 13th is where you land when three computers say top ten and one says 33rd. My new rating system that's still in testing has the Bulldogs 9th, for what it's worth — making me wonder if it needs some recalibration. The next eight games don't have any huge tests, and if SC State is truly a top ten team, they should roll through them, and even then, we won't know for sure.